Nathaniel

by John Saul

  It had been so strange, so flat. Had he really heard it at all?

  He tried to picture it all in his mind: the blackness of the barn and the faint traces of silvery moonlight that had filtered through the wall.

  How could he have seen anything? And he hadn't, he realized, really heard anything. That voice had been in his head, like the voice he had heard just now. Besides, he'd had a headache that night, and he could never quite remember exactly what happened when he had one of those headaches.

  Maybe Ryan was right. Maybe he was crazy.

  He decided he wouldn't talk anymore about what had happened last night, not to anybody. Still, he wished he could talk to his dad about it. His father had always been able to help him figure things out, but now he couldn't do that. Nor could he talk to his grandfather. He shuddered as he remembered the beating a couple of days ago—never his grandfather. But maybe his grandmother. Maybe sometime when he was alone with his grandmother, he'd talk to her about it.

  Maybe…

  As soon as Janet and Michael had left the house that morning, Amos had begun calling around Prairie Bend, trying to find Shadow's owner.

  No one, however, was missing a dog, nor did anyone respond to Amos's description of Shadow. He hung up the phone after the last call and turned to Anna. "Well, I guess it's a stray. I'm gonna get my gun."

  Anna glared at her husband. "You mean you're going to shoot that dog?"

  "That's what I mean to do," Amos replied, his voice grim.

  "No."

  Amos turned baleful eyes on his wife. "What did you say?"

  "There's no reason to shoot it. What's it done to you?"

  "I don't like dogs."

  "Sometimes I don't like you, either," Anna retorted, her voice low but steady. "Does that mean I should shoot you?"

  "Anna—"

  "It's not your dog, Amos. It's Michael's dog. It may have saved his life, and if you do anything to that animal, Michael will never forgive you. Your daughter hates you, and your son ran away from you. Do you want your grandson to hate you, too?"

  "He'll never know," Amos told her. "By the time he gets home, the dog will be dead and buried. We'll tell him it ran away. He'll believe us."

  "He might," Anna agreed. "He might believe us if we both told him that, but if you tell him the dog ran off, and I tell him you shot it, who's he going to believe?"

  Amos's eyes hardened. "You wouldn't do that, Anna. You've never gone against my wishes, and you won't now."

  "I will," Anna told him, folding her hands in her lap. "This time I will. You leave that dog alone."

  Amos left the house without another word, but he felt his wife's eyes oh him as he crossed the yard to the barn.

  His wife's eyes, and Shadow's eyes.

  The dog was curled up next to the back porch, his habitual post when Michael either was in the house or had left him behind. When the kitchen door suddenly swung open, and Amos's heavy tread struck the porch, Shadow's body tensed, and a vaguely menacing sound rumbled from his throat. His hackles raised slightly, but he made no move to get up. Amos regarded the dog with angry eyes.

  "Get out of here," he said. He drew his right foot back, then swung it forward. Before the kick could land, Shadow had leapt to his feet and moved a few yards from the house. Amos followed him.

  A yard at a time, Shadow backed away toward the barn. Amos kept steady pace with him, softly cursing at the dog, constantly trying to land one of his boots on Shadow's flank. But each time he lashed out with his foot, Shadow dodged away from him.

  Suddenly the barn was between them and the house, and Shadow stopped backing away. He crouched low to the ground, and his ears lay back flat against his head. His snarl was loud now, and to Amos it appeared that a cunning had come into the animal's eyes.

  Amos tried one more kick.

  This time, Shadow made no attempt to leap away from Amos's foot. Instead, he seemed to wait until the last possible instant, then whipped his body to one side, at the same time twisting his neck so he could clamp his massive jaws down on Amos's ankle. With a lunge, he threw Amos off balance, and the big man fell heavily to the ground, grunting in a combination of pain and anger. In another second Shadow had abandoned his grip on Amos's ankle, and was at his throat, his fangs bared, saliva glistening on his tongue. For a long moment, Amos stared into the animal's eyes, only inches from his own, sure that those sharp canine teeth were about to begin slashing at him.

  But it didn't happen. Instead of attacking Amos, Shadow suddenly moved forward, raising his leg.

  A stream of hot yellow fluid spurted over Amos, drenching his shirt front, stinging his eyes, gagging him as some of it penetrated his mouth to trickle down his throat. And then, when he was through, Shadow moved off to sit on the ground a few feet away, his tail curled around his legs, his ears up, his tongue hanging from his open mouth.

  Enraged, Amos lay still for a moment, then rose to his feet and started toward the house. But when he emerged a few minutes later, one hand gripping his gun, the yard was empty.

  Shadow had disappeared.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The weeks passed quickly. Janet spent her time working on the little farmhouse that she was fast coming to think of as home. Prairie Bend itself was also becoming home, giving Janet a sense of belonging she hadn't felt since her childhood.

  The village seemed to be making a project of her little farm. Every day, as she and Michael worked on the house, people dropped by. Some of them came to work, some of them came bearing supplies.

  "Found this linoleum out in the shed. Just been sitting there for a couple of years now. Do me a favor and use it before it rots."

  "Got an old wood-electric the missus won't use anymore. Think you might be able to find a place for it? It's not much, but it should last a year or two."

  "Thought I'd use this lumber to build a new hog-shed, but I found a prefab I couldn't pass up. Maybe you can use it to brace up that old cyclone cellar. Fact is, I've got some time, and I could show you how it's done." That man spent the rest of the day and half of the next rebuilding her storm cellar with his own lumber, and acted as if she was doing him a favor by "getting him away from work for a couple of days."

  And so it went. With each day Janet came to feel more a part of the community, came to feel the closeness of the people in Prairie Bend.

  For Michael, though, it was a difficult time. He'd searched everywhere for Shadow, but been unable to find even a trace of the dog. The shepherd seemed to have vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. Every day, Michael asked his grandfather what had happened, and every day, Amos told him the same thing: "That's the way with dogs. They come and they go, and you can't count on them. Be glad that pain-in-the-neck beast's gone." But Michael was not glad, and no matter how Janet tried to cheer him up, his low spirits persisted.

  Amos Hall pulled his Olds to a halt just before the driveway and waved the truck past him. That morning, the moving van had arrived from New York. Finally, after much delay and frustration, Janet and Michael were going to move into their own house. From the back seat, Amos heard Janet's sigh of satisfaction.

  "Just look at it," she said. "It's perfect—just perfect."

  "It did come out nice," Amos agreed. He glanced at Michael, beside him, but the boy remained silent. "We better get on up there before the movers wreck everything," Amos said. He started to put the car in gear, but Janet stopped him.

  "No! I want to walk. I want to enjoy every second of it. After all the work, I just want to soak in what we've done. Come on, Michael!"

  While the elder Halls drove on up to the house, Janet and Michael strolled slowly, enjoying the crunch of gravel under their feet.

  At the top of the newly installed ramp that paralleled the steps to the front porch, Amos and Anna awaited them, and as Janet absorbed the scene, her eyes filled with tears. "I still can't believe it. Last week it was just a poor decaying wreck, and now it's—well, it's everything I ever dreamed of—"

 
"Except for the fence," Anna interrupted, her brow creasing fretfully as she shifted her gaze from the freshly painted house—white with green trim, just as Janet had wanted—to the remnants of the old fence that still stood as a bleak reminder of what the property had been. "I still think you should have gone ahead and let Buck put it in. Post-and-rail would look perfect here."

  "It's not practical," Amos interjected, picking up the argument that he and Anna had been wrangling over for days, and which Janet suspected was about more than a simple fence. "What you need is some barbed wire."

  Anna opened her mouth to contradict her husband, but Janet stopped her.

  "Let's forget about the fence and go look inside before it gets all cluttered up."

  Inside, the dinginess, and neglect were gone, replaced everywhere with a bright newness that belied the age of the structure. The off-white paint had, as Janet hoped, given the small rooms a more spacious feeling than had existed before. She moved from room to room slowly, placing furniture in her mind's eye, selecting papers for the walls that would bring the rooms to life while retaining their feeling of coziness.

  In the kitchen, a blue-painted table with cane-seated chairs, rescued from someone's attic, sat next to the window, and an old, but serviceable, refrigerator purred next to the wood-electric stove that Janet had already come to love. She patted the imposing hunk of cast iron affectionately.

  "I haven't seen one of those since I was a child. I'd have sworn they all wound up in the junkyards years ago."

  "Out here we still need them," Anna replied ruefully. "When the power goes, sometimes it seems like it's going to stay gone forever." Then she smiled brightly. "But that's mostly in winter, of course. Until November, it's usually back on in an hour or two."

  Suddenly Michael's voice interrupted them, shouting from the backyard. "Mom! Mom, come quick! Look!"

  Janet stepped out onto the back porch, with Anna and Amos following behind her. Michael was pointing off into the distance, toward the newly plowed field that stretched away toward the river. Janet's eyes followed her son's gesturing arm, and in a moment she saw it.

  It was Shadow, trotting slowly up the field, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, his tail low to the ground.

  "Shadow!" Michael yelled. "It's Shadow, Mom! Come on, boy. Come on, Shadow!"

  The dog's tail came up and began waving like a banner in the breeze. His trot gave way to a dead run, and he charged up the field, barking wildly. A moment later he'd vaulted the fence separating the field from the barnyard and then was on top of Michael, knocking him off his feet, putting his forepaws firmly on the boy's chest while he licked his face.

  As Janet watched the scene in the yard, she heard Anna's voice behind her. "So he ran away, did he? Gone for good, was he?" Then, for the first time, Janet heard her mother-in-law chuckle. "I think I like that dog. Yes, I think I do."

  Amos, however, made no reply to his wife's remarks. Instead, he simply turned and wordlessly went back into the house.

  A few minutes later, with Shadow on his heels, Michael burst excitedly into the kitchen. "Can I take him upstairs, Mom? I want to show him my room." Then he paused and cocked his head. "Mom? Can we sleep here tonight?"

  "Of course," Janet replied. "Where else would we sleep? This is our home now."

  "Oh, but how can you, dear?" Anna protested as Michael and Shadow pounded up the stairs. "There's still so much to be done. You don't want to try to live in the middle of all the unpacking, do you?"

  Janet stopped her with a gesture. "Anna, if you were in my place, where would you stay tonight?"

  Anna hesitated only a moment, then her habitual look of worry gave way to a tiny smile. "If it were me, you couldn't pry me out of here with a crowbar," she agreed. "I'd be up all night, putting things away, and making plans, and driving Amos crazy." She sighed as they reached the bottom of the stairs, and looked wistfully up toward the second floor, but said nothing about the fact that there was, at present, no way for her to get there. Then, after a moment, she smiled again. "It's a nice little house, isn't it?" she asked of no one in particular. "Such a shame, the condition it had gotten into. All those years, just standing here. And we let it go, too, of course."

  Janet, who was already halfway up the stairs, paused and turned back to face her mother-in-law. "It wasn't you who let it go," she said, her voice low and her expression serious. "It was Mark."

  Anna seemed to recoil from Janet's words, her right hand reflexively coming up to flutter at her bosom, her eyes clouding over. "Why, Janet, what on earth do you mean?"

  Janet hesitated, wondering what exactly she had meant by her words. Indeed, she hadn't meant to say them at all. They had just slipped out, unbidden and unconsidered. And yet, as she thought about it, she realized she meant the words, realized that during the past weeks, as she'd worked so hard to restore the house to what it had once been, she'd begun to resent Mark's neglect of the place and, more and more, come to resent Mark himself. Mark, who had lied to her. A feeling had grown inside her that the past was not the only thing Mark had hidden from her and that as she began going through his papers—all the files he'd kept locked away in his office at the university, but that were now packed in cardboard cartons in the little parlor at the front of the house—she'd find more hidden things, find another Mark, one he'd kept as well hidden as this farm, whom she'd never known and wasn't at all sure she wanted to meet. And yet for Anna, there was no hidden Mark. There was only a memory of the boy who had been her son and who had run away from her, who had finaly come home only to be taken cruelly from her. How could she talk to this woman who had suffered so, about her own dark feelings?

  "Nothing," Janet finally said. "Nothing at all, really. It's just that I don't want you to feel bad about the condition the house was in. After all, you gave it to Mark, didn't you? So it wasn't really your responsibility."

  "But Mark was our son," Anna replied. "Everything he was or did was our responsibility, wasn't it?"

  Janet met the older woman's intense gaze for a moment, wondering what, if anything, to say. Then, at last, she turned silently away, and continued on up to the second floor.

  "It's perfect," Janet repeated an hour later when they were all gathered together again in the little parlor. Her eyes moved from Amos to Anna and then back again. "How can I thank you? How can I ever thank you for all you've done?"

  "You don't have to," Amos Hall told her. "We did it because we belong to you, and you belong to us. You're ours, Janet. You must never forget that."

  Janet returned her father-in-law's smile. "I won't," she whispered. "You can be sure I won't."

  And then, with her son, Janet Hall was alone in her house.

  It was late in the afternoon when Janet looked out the kitchen window and, for the first time, saw Ben Findley. He was in his barnyard, throwing feed to the chickens, and as Janet watched him he suddenly looked up, as if he'd felt her eyes on him. A moment later, he turned abruptly and disappeared into his house, and Janet heard the slam of his screen door echo like a cannonshot through the stillness of the prairie afternoon.

  She stood thoughtfully at the sink for a moment, then made up her mind. "Michael?" she called from the foot of the stairs. "What are you doing?"

  "Nothing," Michael called back. "Just sorting out my stuff. Can I use an old blanket for a bed for Shadow?"

  "Okay. I'll be back in a few minutes. I just have to run next door."

  Without waiting for a reply, she left the house, crossed the yard, and carefully worked her way through the barbed wire fence that separated her property from Findley's. A few minutes later she stood on his collapsing porch, knocking at his front door. When there was no response, she knocked again, more loudly. Again, there was only silence from the interior of the house. Just as she was beginning to think the man had decided to ignore her, the door opened slightly, and Ben Findley peered at her, his face lost in the shadows of his house, his veined eyes cloudy with suspicion.

  "Mr. Findley?" Janet ask
ed. "I'm Janet Hall—"

  "I know who you are," Ben Findley cut in. "You're Mark Hall's widow."

  Janet nodded, feeling faintly, foolish. Of course he'd know who she was. She decided to try again. "I live next door, and when I saw you in your yard, I thought it was time we got acquainted."

  "Why?"

  "Why?" Janet echoed. Of all the possible responses, this was the last she'd expected.

  "I didn't ask you to come live there, and where you live is none of my business," Findley said in a harsh, flat voice. "Just because you live next door, don't think that's going to make us neighbors. It's not."

  "But I only thought—"

  "I don't give a damn what you thought, young woman," Findley growled. "I know how this town is—everybody knowing everybody else's business, and acting real friendly-like. Well, I can tell you, it's bullshit- Pure bullshit, and I don't want no part of it a'tall. Most folks out here have come to respect that, and they leave me alone."

  Reflexively, Janet took a step back. "I—I'm sorry you feel that way."

  Findley's eyes narrowed, and his lips tightened. "Don't be. I don't want your pity. All I want is to be left alone. That's why I have that fence. It's not only to keep the critters in. It's to keep people out. I notice it didn't stop you, though."

  Janet felt the first twinge of anger stab at her. "Mr. Findley, I was just trying to be friendly. We're going to be living next door to each other for a long time, and it just seemed to me that the least we could do is know each other. So I came over to say hello."

  "You've said it."

  Furious now, Janet glared at the old man. "Yes, I have, haven't I? And though I'm sure it doesn't interest you, Mr. Findley, I already wish I hadn't wasted my time." She turned away and started off the porch, fully expecting to hear the sound of the door slamming behind her. Instead, she was surprised to hear Findley's voice once more.